|
 |
Fastest language to read? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Dylanarama Newbie United States Joined 5234 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 25 06 June 2011 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
What writing system is the fastest to read? Has anyone ever done any studies on this? What about different types of writing systems, are abjads faster than alphabets, ideograms faster than syllabic alphabets? I am not talking what are the fastest to learn, just the fastest to read.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5755 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 2 of 25 06 June 2011 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I don't know about normal reading, but the fastest language to skim must be Japanese. That's because most content words are written in kanji so they jump out at the reader from the background of hiragana.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5002 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 3 of 25 06 June 2011 at 6:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I think that the main thing that makes a difference in reading speed is how much space each word takes up on a page. The difference is slight, but it does take longer to scan over a long word than a short word. So languages with long words will take longer to read just because it takes more lines of text to convey the same amount of information. For this reason I think that readers of Chinese can probably attain the fastest reading speed.
I do think that ideograms make a language faster to read, since they compress a syllable (or in the case of Japanese, two or more) plus its meaning into a single little square, instead of being stretched out into a string of letters. Another factor is how many words a language requires in order to make sense grammatically; a language that requires you to use a lot of words to make yourself understood will take longer to read than a language that doesn't use articles or plurals and lets you drop unnecessary sentence parts. Japanese has a lot of long verb endings, but when I compared the Japanese and Chinese versions of the same manga, the number of kanji/kana in the Japanese speech bubbles was usually equal to or less than the number of characters in the Chinese speech bubbles. And the English version of the same story had trouble fitting all the text inside the bubbles, even when using a small font! (But this was a fan translation; officially published English manga will trim lines and leave out extraneous information in order to make it look neater. And of course this is only a problem with particularly wordy manga.) At any rate, I think any differences in reading speed between languages are very small, even though they are interesting to think about, and the biggest limit is the rate at which your brain can process the information you are reading.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. That's one of my favorite things about the way Japanese uses kanji. I also like the way verb stems stand out. Edited by galindo on 06 June 2011 at 7:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LearningFrench Newbie United States Joined 4717 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 25 06 June 2011 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
French must be one of the slower languages to read. All of the the little articles and such. However, I do
think Chinese characters have some disadvantage because you have to "recall" their meaning, thus slowing you down. However, if you know all of the characters perfectly that's not a problem, and for the sake of argument I think it is also quite efficient. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5561 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 25 06 June 2011 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
LearningFrench, it's actually the opposite. Reading Chinese characters does not require subvocalization to the same extent reading an alphabet, abjad or syllabary does. If you know the characters, that is. Edited by Bao on 06 June 2011 at 8:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4985 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 6 of 25 06 June 2011 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think that when people read, they actually "hear" the words in their head, so I'm guessing that Chinese people actually have to convert the symbols they read to something they can "hear", which might take longer. Obviously, it would be possible to read a Chinese character without knowing its pronunciation, but would Chinese people be comfortable with this, I wonder? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5002 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 7 of 25 06 June 2011 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's only a problem when you're learning them. An experienced reader doesn't have to pause and try to remember the meaning; they just automatically know it, along with the pronunciation. When you see the word "apple" you don't stop and think, "Hmm, I think that was some sort of red fruit...", you simply know what it is. Characters are the same, except that they have extra clues to meaning instead of just the sound.
It might make more sense if you think of it as a very complicated syllabary. You don't "convert" anything as you read; the sound and meaning simultaneously appear in your head. The main difference from reading with an alphabet is that the pronunciation clues are not transparent, while the meaning is (to some extent). I don't think it's possible to look at a character and not "hear" its sound (or one of its readings if it's in Japanese). The only time that might happen is when a learner encounters a character they don't know well, and they remember the meaning but not the sound. I think that in Japanese the relationship between spoken words and characters is a bit more complicated, but even so you will "hear" something when you read a character. There are some words that can be read several ways, so if you guess wrong you might read it differently than the author intended, but you still can't separate the meaning from the sound you associate with it. Edited by galindo on 06 June 2011 at 9:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5561 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 25 06 June 2011 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Andrew C, exactly that is what I meant with subvocalization. When you read a sound-based script, you have to first decode the sound-symbol relationship before you can access the meaning, whereas when you read a logographic or ideographic script you first have to access the symbol-meaning relationship; or in the case of Chinese characters you simultaneously access symbol-sound and symbol-meaning relationships as most of the characters do have pronunciation cues in them. At least that is what the research I read about concluded from studies where they tested native speakers with character pairs that were completely unrelated, had a similar shape but different pronunciation or represented homophones with different shape - error rates for homophones were lower than in similar studies that looked at homophones with different spelling in English.
What I also found quite interesting is that I as a non-native English speaker tend to confuse words that are similar in spelling more frequently than native speakers seem to do. Edited by Bao on 06 June 2011 at 11:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
